Interview: “Wake the Dead”: The Recovery, Reinvigoration of Chuck Prophet

Chuck Prophet photo by Michael Aarons

Wake the Dead: The Recovery, Reinvigoration of Chuck Prophet

By Brian D’Ambrosio

Chuck Prophet’s new album is as much about illness and recovery as it is about aspiration and experimentation. But perhaps more so than all of these things, it’s immersed in vision.

Vision allowed him to harvest everything that he could from the music, to better learn from it, to better respect its transcendent and indefinable capabilities. Indeed, Prophet, a singularly eclectic talent who rarely hopscotches the same pavement twice, leaned on the revelation of music for the comfort and escape that he needed to overcome a recent cancer diagnosis.

The result, Wake the Dead, is a stylistic gem, a spring of brave hope and resilient promise, an abundantly textured offering of deep re-invigoration and clear, harmonious reverence. It is the tiding of the heart and soul of a musician who trusts in culture and knowledge, and the sense of awe and faith derived from deep inside them.

Mortality Walked Towards Him

A few years ago, during a routine examination, physicians located a mass of cancer cells and then immediately wheeled Prophet into another room to undergo additional scans.

“The oncologist was talking to me as I was coming out of the fog with the sedatives,” said Prophet. “She asked, Charles, lost any weight lately? What’s your family history? I thought, hey, why is she asking me all of this stuff? From that moment of being told I had cancer forward, I became aware of my mortality. That he (mortality) is walking towards me. You see him coming, and he’s coming.”

Later that evening, Prophet was able to view the results of the scans and see the ominous cancerous points scattered throughout his body.

“There was cancer around my neck, on my chest, and on my abdomen,” said Prophet. “I slammed the lid of my laptop shut because I didn’t want to see it. Those 14 days waiting for more detailed scans were the abyss.”

The bad news was that Prophet was diagnosed with Stage 4 lymphoma, an advanced stage where the cancer had spread to at least one organ beyond the lymphatic system; the good news, however, was that he was told that it was treatable and that he had options for recovery. The astonishing words – “treatable,” “recovery,” “options” – immediately lifted Prophet’s spirits, and after six months of chemotherapy, the radiation shrunk the cancer cells down to nil.

As part of his treatment and recovery, Prophet dove deeply into various forms of music, including Cumbia, a type of Latin music that started in Colombia and expanded in popularity to other parts of South America. It felt good to listen to music for music’s sake – and Cumbia’s peppy, uplifting mix of flutes, maracas, drums and other instruments provided the ideal amount of relief. There were no deadlines to meet or projects to complete. Listening was the break and the breathing space, and its own medicinal supplement.
“I’d never been afforded the time to soak in music as much as I did during those times,” said Prophet. “I had time just to be. That was unusual for me because I’d been grinding out records since I was 20-years-old.”

Before long, Prophet’s mental outlook shifted from a state of worry to a sense of purpose, and he was determined to turn his misfortune into majesty.

Music Everywhere

Music has virtually always been at the heart of Chuck Prophet’s life, filling all things in every way. He spent his childhood in southern California, where music was in the air everywhere. Radio stations were the primary outlet and connection – KHJ, KEZY, KNAC. KROQ-FM. KNEW – and the list goes on and on.
“I definitely had the antennae up as far as music,” said Prophet, “I liked pop music and I liked guitar. My sister brought home a guitar from camp, and I was lucky to live in an era and neighborhood where a lot of people played guitar. There was guitar class at school. I got my driver’s license and punk rock came along. At the punk rock shows, seeing them laying it on the line in some way, I first thought maybe I could do this.”

For forty years, Prophet has ravished music with his love, a long journey across genres and experiences; a long journey that he has come to find out is nowhere near the finish line.

Cumbia: Nourishing the Body and Spirit

As it turned out, Prophet’s manager was at Amados, a club on Valencia Street in San Francisco, when a band called ¿Qiensave? (Quien-Sa-Be) pulled up, unloaded their gear, and tore into the sound check.
At his manager’s encouraging, Prophet showed up at the club and was totally enamored with what he heard – joyful lamenting, double beats, brass instruments, enchanting guitars – something similar to what he had been enjoying while returning to health. Afterward, Prophet asked the band members a bunch of questions about them and their music. He learned that ¿Qiensave? was a group of brothers from Salinas, a farming community on the Central Coast of California. They told him that they had a house in the woods and that he could come and jam, and even better, if he did come that he could turn up the speakers and volume as loud as he wanted.

“That began a great relationship,” said Prophet.

Prophet said that it might surprise people that a musician out of San Francisco with a million choices would be so keen to hang out with a group of guys playing such unusual melodies in a town like Salinas, though it really shouldn’t.

“Nobody plays this stuff as good as they do,” said Prophet. “Salinas has a scene, clubs, and more bands, a scene indigenous to their roots.”

Indeed, Wake the Dead is nourishment for body and spirit, a marvelous recording that sweeps the room like a good time reckoning.

“It’s the music of working class weekends and Miller Time,” said Prophet. “Cumbia is romance, food, family, music, dancing, either alone in the shadows, or with your partner. The music can make you cry, but it’s all tears of joy, and it’s wonderful.”

The gauge of any worthwhile project in Prophet’s mind is if it gets his creative juices utterly consumed, like the way that this one did.

“Every couple of years somehow or another I tap into something that gets me excited and takes me some place,” said Prophet. “Takes me some place where I feel I haven’t been before. All of my records are kind of a reaction to the one that came before it – and then a left turn.”

Prophet said that he likes the response to the music that he is not only sensing but seeing; it delivers a thrill and a charge when he looks out into the audience and notices that the whole room is swaying.

“With indie rock, you stand on a sticky black floor and watch a band. In Latin culture, it is not just about watching the band. If what you are playing is not danceable, they will split.”

Prophet said that Wake the Dead is reflective of the vibes of the musicians that he played with, who even now seem to be uniquely at ease, enjoying the fruit of an unhurried pace, living on their own schedule.
“They like to hang out and they are not in a hurry,” said Prophet. “They are all under 30, I think. I’m 61. It’s cool to not be thinking about which chord comes next or where that background vocal part fits, but just getting to a place where you can really get lost in it.”

Right now, Prophet is clothed with joy, seeing it all with new eyes and ears. Many days come and go when he doesn’t think about cancer even once. Still, he realizes that he now is part of a club that he never intended to belong to – a truth that provokes its own set of sensibilities.

“I would like for people to know that there are more and more ways to treat cancer than there has ever been. Hopefully, my story and my music can help someone else.”

Thanks for chatting with us, Chuck.  Find more information here on his website: http://www.chuckprophet.com

Enjoy our previous coverage here: Show Review: Chuck Prophet at Club Cafe

A lover and teller of troubadour truths, Brian D’Ambrosio may be reached at dambrosiobrian@hotmail.com. He is at work on a book anthology of singer-songwriter interviews titled Troubadour Truths and is always looking for new subjects.